9 sublime cyberpunk songs you need to hear

When "cyberpunk music" gets mentioned, classics like Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack and Rob Dougan's "Clubbed to Death" from The Matrix always get brought up (and somewhat-derisive mentions of Billy Idol's foray into the genre also get ref'ed). But there's a wealth of cyberpunk-themed pieces which aren't pure electronica/techno, yet carry the welcome baggage of a stir-fry future gone mad in freefall.

Like the cyborgs and biomods often found in cyberpunk fiction, the best cyberpunk music is at once mechanical yet human, living paradoxes which bridge the best of different worlds together. Eerily imaginative, oftentimes explosively propulsive, this makes great listening for feeling like the future's at your front door — and if you're not in the mood for that, it also goes well with concentration-demanding activities like reading and coding. Like Csíkszentmihályi (good lord that's a tough name) said… "flow".

1. Deep Forest – "Strange Days"

From the Ken Burns-effected end titles of the same name, and a suitably fitting masterpiece from the duo that married the pygmies with hip-hop rhythms. Crisp, ratchety breakbeats build up tension while skillfully-sampled Macedonian vocals pan forth, male and female voices alternating. The melodies are sublime, a transcendental experience where few have ventured, and as an aural parallel to the jacked-in VR trips in the movie, it takes you out of your mind into someone else's — in this case, the brilliant brains of Frenchmen Mouquet & Sanchez.

One of the highlights has got to be when the beat disappears and you're left with the emotive vox and soft synth pads. A freakin' perfect chord progression unfolds, guiding you on your way back to the promised land of beats. Oh, and did I mention freakin' Peter Gabriel sings on this?

2. Orbital – "Sad But True"

I admit I never watched the Johnny Mnemonic whose soundtrack this comes from, but the bass is KILLER. The first revelatory, elevatory experience I had playing this out (to play us out!? What does that mean?!) was in a rickety music school with an antique sound system. I pressed play on the cassette tape, and the warbling robot noises and off-kilter laser stabs were like Dalek sex. What caught me off-guard as 8-bar passages kept building new layers was Alison Goldfrapp's (yes, her) vocals, soaring above the whirring chatter.

You can hear the original, and this is the live version, which is even more stretched out — but the volume's a bit soft, so pump up the jams!

3. The Future Sound of London – "My Kingdom"

FSOL were among the leading limelights of the failed (no thanks, superficial media) 1997 electronica revolution stateside. They've been making a return to prolificity in recent years by sharing nuggets from their archives, but "My Kingdom" will continue to be an unsurpassed legend. The video places bizarre happenings as blobby CG-forms drift over the landscape, at a time when such effects were confined to demoscene parties and hadn't yet touched mainstream cinema.

With an impressively lucid linesight to Vangelis's Blade Runner heritage, "My Kingdom" samples "Rachel's Song" to great effect, placing itself amidst a meta-cosmopolitan blend of shucked backwards drum loops, aggressive clock-like chimes, and floaty flutes. This will sound as relevant in 2025 A.D. as it does today, if not more.

4. Deus Ex – "The Synapse"

A quasi-pentatonic spree kicks things off before the deep bass and 16th-notes signal the driving tempo. Echo-delay effects increase the atmospheric lushness amidst a stark gray skyline. In other words, the ideal soundtrack for mysteries unfolding in a near-future Hong Kong, brought to us by the sheer awesomeness of Alexander Brandon, whose main DX theme even comes in @ 1:04, lending leitmotif cohesiveness to one of the best computer game scores to this day.

One can simply not get the full Deus Ex experience — incidentally, one of the best computer games to this day — without hearing this and running into the triads, or at least, hacking Maggie Chow with the Dragon's Tooth Sword and sending her to her well-deserved death (at least I thought so). Every. Single. Element. Works. TOGETHER!

Works lovely as a standalone track too, as Brandon himself will tell ya.

5. Spectre VR – Title music

Already indulging in known cyberpunk cliches at the time, part Tron, part Battlezone, Spectre VR threw you into a virtual tank on a black battlefield, lined with white dots and misc. polygons. Your mission? To kill every other tank (and other odd opponents, like slicer-sharks) on the battlefield. The music could be similarly sparse but addictive, pumping tightly-quantized bleeps 'n' bloops like Hal 9000 marrying Red October. While I need to call out the title music, the diversity of tunes (including synth-Bach renditions) was an excellent package.

Occasionally, you'd get a sampled guitar crunch thrown in as a treat (the game's resource files revealed it was dubbed "Hendrix"), and other surprising elements kept you on your toes. I couldn't help but share my memories earlier, and 2 years later, the music is still fresh in my mind.

6. Descent – "Level 1: Lunar Outpost"

Shame on me for never playing this game to this day, only watching a friend gamely give it a go on his old 386. Descent itself wasn't even my first exposure to the music: I heard it as MIDI files played back through my hardware GM synth, and wondered how the original sounded. The answer was: pretty much le same. Roland's crisp TR-808 hi-hats click throughout as a tight saw wave begins the procession. More elements undulate and ungulate (yes, the music marched as if it were hoofed!), providing the equivalent of PLURR spirit in the midst of cramped 6DOF navigation. World's most claustrophobic rave party? Awwwwyeah.

But really, listening to the tune itself told me all I needed to know, which is what it shares in common with the other 6 selections: it'd suit other works of cyberpunk well, unabashedly brandishing its paranoia pecking with even a touch of electric cowbell. There's some other music in this clip, but the one I'm referring to starts @ 6:50:

7. Karsten Obarski – crystalhammer.mod

I know, we're getting decidedly more inorganic here, but that's only because we're tracing the timeline to when things weren't so, ahem, elegant. And it's within that crude fashioning of 4-voice sound chips that we find this beauty. Also simply known as "Crystal Hammer" and accompanying a game of the same name (which I never played either), my first exposure to this came after I had moved into a new house and had 3.5" diskettes at my disposal for my then-new Mac. One of them had a tracker-playing program for MOD files (I'd owned an Amiga 500 too), and among the included selection was none other than the deliriously catchy crystalhammer.mod!

Melodic, progressive, and reeking with the hairspray signature of an 80s pop tune (worn with mirrorshades of course), crystalhammer.mod would haunt me in years to come. And now it should infect you too. So here's Katsoa's remix with a heavier beat, and you can also tune into the partial original:

8. Yoko Kanno & Origa – "Inner Universe"

Were you wondering when an obligatory anime reference was going to show up? Here it is! And it's far from gratuitous: "Inner Universe's" cross-cultural power is reflected in the roots of singer Origa's Russian ethnicity, coupled with Yoko Kanno's throbbing arrangement. Together, they created this soaring opus which works majestically for the cutting-edge intro to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

Even though cyberpunk commonly has dystopian/authoritarian themes and society's conflicts with technology — or fringe members of society using technology to cause conflict with others — as I've noted, humanity shines through, and whether it's slight string wells and electric piano twinges (as contained here) or another subtle element like the playful bounce for the Tachikoma tunes, it's a toast to the hopes that we will continue.

9. Klaus Badelt – "Kata Moves" from the Equilibrium OST

Melding almost-acid tweakage with percussion rolls and blockbuster orchestration, Equilibrium's soundtrack is a more-than-satisfying suite. (And if it sounds kind of Hans Zimmery at times, it's because Badelt and Zimmer have collaborated.) Without getting annoyingly overblown into the techy bits, there's a foreboding, oppressive shadow to most of this work, and if you enjoyed the Deus Ex music, this has similar atmospherics. In fact, if the unlikely Deus Ex movie ever happens, I hope Badelt or someone like him will score

Overall, Equilibrium is a very different affair from the stylings of Vangelis, who also generally combined synth + orchestration in Blade Runner. Check it out at 2:26 when the beats kick into overdrive and the rez zaps provide a counter-rhythm to the intense drumming. Like I said, it feels as if the future is at your front door.

And by the way, the video at the very top is Tryptamiini's creative concept of envisioning Equilibrium's Christian Bale as Deus Ex's JC Denton, complete with DX voice clips and music. And thus, the circle is complete.

Where I'm coming from

Sometimes, music is the closest thing I know to time travel: hearing just about any one of the above melodies jogs, then jaunts my mind back to when I was a wide-eyed youth just beginning to really get into computers. The Internet would follow some years later, but I spent many a time dialing locally to a BBS, watching text crawl by in clumps of characters. This was also an era before computers knew the strenuous multitasking they do today, so it was out of the question for me to boot up a music player in the background and listen while computing on something else.

"Cyberpunk" isn't just a stylistic label for me: it's a temporal marker that informs my roots, my influences which I pay respect to, and in doing so, informs and prepares me for what I'll do next. Great art inspires, and similar to how cyberpunk imagery like cascading green glyphs and massive ad screens plastered on mega-cities are staples of the form's visual language, these audio counterparts have already proved influential and familiar, yet tantalizingly alien.

Do you have fave cyberpunk songs I didn't list here? I didn't get into the more industrial/EBM aspects, as they weren't intimately related to memories of my youth. But by all means, if what I've shared with you has helped you time travel too, whether it's the early-80's sprawl of Neuromancer or wave of reality-questioning films that set sail in the late 90's, I want to know your memories!*

* And you don't have to tell me about your mother.